I would have to say that the best evidence for evolution comes from the definition of evolution:

(1) The process of evolution involves changes in the composition of hereditary traits, and changes to the frequency of their distributions within breeding populations from generation to generation, in response to ecological challenges and opportunities for growth, development, survival and reproductive success in changing or different habitats.

The best evidence for evolution is the fact that this is observed in virtually every generation of every living species.

If we look at the continued effects of evolution over many generations, the accumulation of changes from generation to generation may become sufficient for individuals to develop combinations of traits that are observably different from the ancestral parent population.

(2) The process of lineal change within species is sometimes called phyletic speciation, or anagenesis.

However, if anagenesis was all that occurred, then all life would be one species, readily sharing DNA via horizontal transfer (asexual) and interbreeding (sexual) and various combinations. This is not the case, however, because there is a second process that results in multiple species and increases the diversity of life.

(3) The process of divergent speciation, or cladogenesis, involves the division of a parent population into two or more reproductively, an isolated daughter populations, which then are free to (micro) evolve independently of each other.

Both of these processes are observed when we look at multiple generations, and this means that the basic processes of "macroevolution" (as defined and used in evolutionist biology) are observed, known objective facts, and not untested hypothesies, even if major groups of species are not observed forming (which would take many many generations).

(4) The Theory of Evolution (ToE), stated in simple terms, is that the process of anagensis, and the process of cladogenesis, are sufficient to explain the diversity of life as we know it, from the fossil record, from the genetic record, from the historic record, and from everyday record of the life we observe in the world all around us.

This theory is tested by experiments and field observations carried out as part of the science of evolution. It is tested by every new fossil, and every new DNA sequence, and this is why what Mr Jack said in Message 102 is valid: virtually everything we see is confirmation of evolution.

The scientific evidence for evolution is a fascinating topic, from Darwin and others' researches in the 19th century to 20th and 21st century discoveries. Here's a brief summary:

What is evolution in the first place? When an animal such as a horse, whale, dog, chicken, shark or beetle is born (or hatched, as the case may be) it becomes a member of one more generation in a long sequence of generations reaching back into the far distant past. What did those ancestors of long-ago generations look like? How are the different living things you see around you related?

Take the example of the horse or whale or other mammal. The first fossil evidence of mammals is from the Triassic Period, when the reptiles still ruled. The early mammals were small (often described by paleontologists as "shrew-like" or "mouse-like" animals) and certainly far different from the horses, whales, elephants and other mammals we see today. So we have evolutionary change over many generations. The most important evidence for evolution is the simplest: go from point A, an ancestor, to point B, a creature living today of much different form than that ancestor.

What do Creationists think happened to get from point A to point B? Millions and millions of miracles, over millions and millions of years, creating new forms of life in the precise order that matches the fossil record and the DNA evolutionary tree? Why weren't whales created at the same time as fish? Surely if they were created ex nihilo, it would be strange to create all those land mammals first, then create the forms with vestigial limbs, then finally the fully aquatic forms . . . exactly in the order of their evolution.

There is more evidence for evolution in the simple fact that we see it happening all the time, all around us. It seems unlikely that God would use miracles to create new species in the distant past, but nowadays allow species to evolve naturally, not bothering with miracles anymore. For examples, we have:

Do a web search on "examples of observed speciation" to find more examples, if you like.

Then there is the distribution of life forms on Earth. Of course, one would expect polar bears and penguins in cold climates, camels and cacti in hot climates. But why do we find penguins only in Antarctica and other regions in the southern hemisphere, but not in the north? Why should there be no camels in the deserts of North America? Alfred Russell Wallace typically gets second billing to Darwin, because of the fame of Origin of Species, but he is justly famous in his own right. Among other things, he studied the geographic ranges that species inhabited. The Creationist idea that different species were created especially for particular climates and environments was shown to be incorrect when Wallace observed that mountains and rivers marked the boundaries of the ranges of many species. He discovered that there were regions that were similar, but inhabited by very different animals.

Then there are the "evolutionary leftovers" that indicate the living creatures we see around us weren't created totally new, but instead bear evidence of change from earlier forms. The "panda's thumb" is a popular example. Notice that these are NOT imperfections (the argument with Creationists - if any - who believe that all of the created life forms are without blemish is a different argument) but traces of ancestry remaining in the body of the organism. The most glaring example, of course, is the eyes of blind cave fish. Why would they have been "created" by God with vestigial eyes? There are many other examples: the laryngeal nerve, the appendix, whale hip bones and vestigial leg bones, goose bumps and human body hair, kiwi bird vestigial wings, vestigial crab tails, vestigial koala caruncles, etc.

Then we have evidence from DNA. Chromosome #2 in humans is the most famous example: fused from two chromosomes that are separate in chimpanzee DNA, showing a common ancestor of humans and chimps.

There are other more subtle DNA traces showing common ancestry. Some of our genetic material is "pseudo-genes," genes that no longer code for a protein because of a mutation, and so are "inactive" bits of the DNA code. Consider DNA as instructions for assembling complex machines, because that's what DNA is: instructions for the chemical reactions of a developing organism. If two similar machines have similar instruction manuals, then they might have just got nearly the same wording because the machines have similar functions. But suppose the instruction manuals have the same typographical or grammar errors? Then we would expect the manuals to come from a common source. In the analogy, this would represent a common ancestor in the case of living creatures. A concrete example is the gene for synthesizing vitamin C. We need to consume vitamin C because our gene is inactive. Mapping such genes shows the common descent of humans and other primates, but demonstrates that other mammals (the guinea pig is one example) are further away on the evolutionary tree. The same pseudogene is present in humans and primates, but the guinea pig has a different pseudogene. "Intelligent Design" might argue for similarities in the active DNA code between humans and chimps, and dissimilarities between human and guinea pigs, but the inactive part of the DNA indicates the branching of the evolutionary tree.

quote:Endogenous retroviruses are the remnant DNA of a past viral infection. Retroviruses (like the AIDS virus or HTLV1, which causes a form of leukemia) make a copy of their own viral DNA and insert it into their host's DNA. This is how they take over the cellular machinery of a cell and use it to manufacture new copies of the virus.

Sometimes, the cell that gets infected by such a virus is an immature egg cell in the ovary of a female animal. Such cells can be stored in a state of suspended animation or dormancy for as much as 50 years before they complete meiosis and become mature egg cells ready to be fertilized. Because they are dormant, gene expression is suppressed and the infection cannot take over the cell and kill it. If that egg later matures and is fertilized, the newborn organism will have that endogenous retrovirus in every one of its cells, and so will all of its descendants.

Every viral infection is unique. The complete genome of an animal is so huge, and the insertion point of a virusâ€™s DNA is so random that it is statistically impossible for any two individuals to have the same exact endogenous retrovirus in the same exact spot on the genome unless they both inherited it from a common ancestor who had the original infection. And the infection of a germ cell is so rare that ERVs make up only somewhere between 1% and 8% of the entire human genome.

If two humans have the same identical ERV, it is proof that they are descended from a common ancestor. And if two different species have the identical ERV, it is proof that they too are descended from a common ancestor. In humans, there are about 30,000 different ERVS embedded in each person's DNA. Except for those later duplicated by a duplication mutation, all of them record unique infections of a single ancestral individual. Now here is where it gets really interesting.

There are at least seven different known instances of shared ERVs between chimps and humans... i.e. ERVs which are the identical viral DNA inserted into the identical spot of the genome. 100% of all chimps and 100% of all humans have these same ERVs. This is only possible if 100% of all chimps and all humans are descended from the single individual that had these original infections.

They are proof that humans and chimps share a common ancestor.

In a 2000 paper published in the journal Gene researchers identified ERVS shared by different primates and used them to assemble a family tree of monkeys apes and humans.

Even at the level of single-celled life, there is interesting DNA evidence. Cellular structures such as mitochondria or chloroplasts have their own DNA, distinct from the DNA found in the cell nucleus. This is evidence for the evolution of the first single-celled life, cells with no nucleus or organelles, into more complex forms. Chloroplast DNA, for example, is evidence of a photosynthetic cyanobacterium that was engulfed by an early eukaryotic cell to form a larger symbiotic organism that could photosynthesize.

Then, of course, there are other interesting facts about the genetic material of living organisms, such as the chromosome count. If life were designed from some Divine blueprint, we would expect the more complex organisms to have more DNA and therefore more chromosomes. And Man, of course, at the top of the heap, according to Genesis, and made in God's image, should have the most: toolmaking skills, memory, brain, long life, the immortal soul, and, of course, a body larger and more complex than almost all of the millions of other organisms on the planet. For some organisms, this pattern does indeed hold. Myrmecia pilosula, an ant species, has only one pair of chromosomes and the individual workers, being haploid, have only one chromosome (not even a pair!) each. Small creature, small amount of genetic information. But when we look at even smaller creatures, we find, to our surprise, examples like Amoeba proteus, a microbe with more than 500 chromosomes! And so it goes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, one less than chimpanzees (see the example of chromosome #2 above) and a lot less than Ophioglossum reticulatum, whose 630 chromosome pairs make this lowly fern the reigning champion.

Even for structures of living organisms that don't fossilize well, such as the heart or the eye, we can see the pathways of evolutionary change in the organisms that live today. This is not to say we, with our complex four-chambered heart, are evolved from some modern species of amphibian or fish alive today, of course. Living species are all leaves on the evolutionary tree, with the branches down below showing where different forms of life diverged. But modern forms of reptile, amphibian, fish and others can show us the path evolution took along those branches.

The mammalian four chamber heart is slightly different from the reptilian three-and-a-half chamber heart, which is different from the amphibian three chamber heart, which is different from the lungfish heart, which is different from the agnathan two chamber heart, which is different from the paired contractile aorta of the amphioxis, which is different from the single contractile aorta of the hemichordates. Then there is the earthworm who does not use an actual heart; it has one or more small muscular areas capable of contracting and pushing the blood and then reabsorbing it as it filters back.

Finally, consider the timeline of life on Earth. The simplest living things, the primitive unicellular organisms of billions of years ago, took the longest to develop! Why would that be? If a supernatural force were involved, why would it take so many hundreds of millions of years to develop the earliest single-celled life forms, while far more complex organisms, like Archaeopteryx, Australopithecus, Rhynia gwynne-vaughanii, Miohippus, Ichthyostega, Hylonomus, or cynodonts were "created" in the blink (on the geological time scale) of an eye? Seen as a natural process, however, the timeline of change is easy to understand: it takes a long time for nonliving chemicals to develop into living organisms, and it takes a long time for single-celled organisms to make the great leap to combine into multicellular life, if there is no supernatural intervention prodding them along.

Is the Origin of Species miraculous? In the sense that the birth of a child is miraculous, yes. Complex and marvelous, it is true, but also natural, following natural principles of the universe. "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee."

When you write "the best evidence for evolution comes from the definition of evolution" you capture the gist of it. If there were no evolution, then all the new creatures born (or hatched, etc.) would not be different, so over the billions of years of life on earth there would have to have been endless instances of creation of new life forms - in exactly the same order as that of evolutionary change!

Interesting to see such a complete attempt to lay out your defense of the theory of evolution. But as is often the case you don't have any understanding of creationism at all. I don't think I'm up to trying to answer your whole post at the moment but there are at least a few things I want to say:

First, you take the fossil record as evidence of evolution, and while there may be some creationists who accept that idea too I doubt there are many and I certainly don't. In my view the strata in which the fossils are found, that are identified by names llke "Triassic" and assigned millions of years of duration, are much better evidence for the worldwide Flood than for the ToE. I think it very odd, as a matter of fact, that intelligent people think time would be marked by such geological phenomena, a l a y e r of one particular sediment representing a particular time period of millions of years in which particular creatures llved, their burial in the sedimentary l a y e r being the evidence. I find that seriously contemplating that idea leads me to serious cynicism about the "science" that accepts such an idea.

So, not accepting the evolutionary interpretation of the geological column in which the fossils are found, I also don't accept the idea that the fossils themselves represent evolution from one level to the next, from the "Cambrian" to the "Silurian" to the "Permian" and so on. I acknowledge that there is a gradation from one type of creature to another that SEEMS to support the idea but I think that is an illusion, that in reality they are just creatures that were killed in the Flood, which is actually what the Flood was for according to the Bible: to kill all things living on the Earth. I also acknowledge that there is no clear way to explain how they got sorted as they are, but nevertheless this has to be the best interpretation.

As for the evolution interpretation of the fossil record I have the objection that getting new species takes only a few years, a hundred at most and that's a stretch, so the millions of years attached to the geological column are ridiculous. I also have the objection that it's physically impossible for creatures to get buried and fossilized in such an orderly way in separate and discreet sediments over periods of millions of years. I also have the objection that fossilization requires specific conditions, conditions beautifully met by a worldwide Flood but hard to explain on the theory of separate time periods.

What do Creationists think happened to get from point A to point B? Millions and millions of miracles, over millions and millions of years, creating new forms of **** in the precise order that matches the fossil record and the DNA evolutionary tree? Why weren't whales created at the same time as fish? Surely if they were created ex nihilo, it would be strange to create all those land mammals first, then create the forms with vestigial limbs, then finally the fully aquatic forms . . . exactly in the order of their evolution.

Yes, once a person is as persuaded of the ToE as you are it is very hard to get across the wholly different creationist explanation of living things. Of course there are many "creationisms" and even many different views of Creation as found in the Bible, so I'm only giving my own. My view is that there was one Creation of all the separate Kinds of creatures and they each had the capacity to vary into many different kinds or species, so that the Cat Kind produced every kind of cat on the Earth today, and probably many other kinds that didn't make it through the Flood. No millions of years involved, a few thousand is the biblical time period. Anyway, no miracles at all, just normal variation based on the genome of each Kind since the Creation. Nothing was created "first," followed by others, all of it was created at the same time, and again, in the biblical creationist view the "fossil record" is not a record of creation at all, or evolution. All such things as "vestigial" limbs or organs I understand in terms of former functions that have succumbed to disease processes since the Flood, but that's a very long discussion I'm only going to hint at here.

There is more evidence for evolution in the simple fact that we see it happening all the time, all around us. It seems unlikely that God would use miracles to create new species in the distant past, but nowadays allow species to evolve naturally, not bothering with miracles anymore.

The fact is that species or Kinds DO "evolve" and have evolved a great deal since the Creation, but that's because each Kind has its own built-in genome that has the capacity to vary from generation to generation. I don't know if you saw my post illustrating the range of skin colors that probably reflect the genome of Adam and Eve, but the whole range from darkest to lightest is quite possible in that one single genome, playing out down the generations in the whole range of skin colors in their progeny. Same with all the characteristics we see in each Kind, all the races of humanity, all the different kinds of dogs and cats and everything else that *****.

This ability to vary within the Kind is often called "microevolution" because it is confined to the Kind and provides no means of evolving into anything other than that Kind. That too is a long discussion which is being hashed out at EvC almost daily. But the creationist view is that all the variety of living things we see is the product of the capacity for great variation that is built into each Kind's genome.

You go on to mention some examples of plants, worms and mice that are easily enough explained on the creationist model but here is where I'm running out of energy to finish this post so I may come back to finish it later.

Interim summary: What you consider to be ironclad evidence for the ToE is actually open to other interpretations.

Without evolution reality itself changes. The existence of a god also changes reality. Everything we accept as reality changes if there is a God that can change the forces of nature. No one has seen magic or the supernatural. If it exists then the basic concepts of reality are questioned. Science as we know it has no meaning.

Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.

If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?

Without evolution reality itself changes. The existence of a god also changes reality. Everything we accept as reality changes if there is a God that can change the forces of nature. No one has seen magic or the supernatural. If it exists then the basic concepts of reality are questioned. Science as we know it has no meaning.

Interesting. This is how things look from the current point of view in which evolution is so entrenched it appears to be reality itself. Therefore without it reality certainly does change. Today's idea of reality that is, which is mistaken for reality itself.

Before evolution, however, the existence of God was taken for granted, so although that existence today "changes reality," it was evolution that changed reality which at that time had been based on belief in God. Yes, everything that TODAY is accepted as reality "changes if there is a God," but that merely reflects the mind-set of our times, not reality itself. If reality itself includes the existence of God, which of course I believe, then anyone who really cares about reality needs to know there is a God.

But science, true science, the science that develops medicine and discovered electricity and nuclear power and sends rockets into space and all that, is completely compatible with the idea of God, at least the biblical God. When you say it's not you are thinking of the bogus science of the ToE. That's the ONLY "science" that is incompatible and it's a fraud.

quote:First, you take the fossil record as evidence of evolution, and while there may be some creationists who accept that idea too I doubt there are many and I certainly don't.

Which does not speak well of creationists.

quote:In my view the strata in which the fossils are found, that are identified by names llke "Triassic" and assigned millions of years of duration, are much better evidence for the worldwide Flood than for the ToE

Since the Flood could not possibly produce the fossil record your view is not even remotely sensible. The order of the fossil record refutes it (as does a lot of other evidence).

quote:I think it very odd, as a matter of fact, that intelligent people think time would be marked by such geological phenomena, a l a y e r of one particular sediment representing a particular time period of millions of years in which particular creatures llved, their burial in the sedimentary l a y e r being the evidence.

In reality it would be quite strange for it to be a single sediment - most formations are mixed. But otherwise it is a. entirely sensible view, unlike yours.

quote:I find that seriously contemplating that idea leads me to serious cynicism about the "science" that accepts such an idea.

Imagine people actually caring about evidence and reason rather than mindlessly worshipping you! Even when they must know that you will lie about them for daring to defy you!

quote:As for the evolution interpretation of the fossil record I have the objection that getting new species takes only a few years, a hundred at most and that's a stretch, so the millions of years attached to the geological column are ridiculous.

Again your idea is nuts. First, you severely underrate the time needed. Second, you completely ignore the time between speciation events which is the vast bulk of it anyway. Third, the time is not calculated based on evolution are timescales anyway.

quote:I also have the objection that it's physically impossible for creatures to get buried and fossilized in such an orderly way in separate and discreet sediments over periods of millions of years

You are not making sense here. The only order is the historical succession of species which will naturally be represented in the fossil record.

quote:I also have the objection that fossilization requires specific conditions, conditions beautifully met by a worldwide Flood but hard to explain on the theory of separate time periods.

Which is also nuts since a worldwide Flood would not be expected to produce sandstorms - which is how some fossils were originally buried. It isnâ€™t even a sensible objection - even if the Flood would produce suitable conditions it hardly makes it the only explanation. And we already know that the Flood couldnâ€™t produce the fossil record anyway.

quote:Yes, once a person is as persuaded of the ToE as you are it is very hard to get across the wholly different creationist explanation of living things

Or once people properly understand the situation it is hard to fool them into believing crazy nonsense.

quote:Interim summary: What you consider to be ironclad evidence for the ToE is actually open to other interpretations.

Perhaps you should take the time to come up with some viable alternative interpretations.

quote:But science, true science, the science that develops medicine and discovered electricity and nuclear power and sends rockets into space and all that, is completely compatible with the idea of God, at least the biblical God. When you say it's not you are thinking of the bogus science of the ToE. That's the ONLY "science" that is incompatible and it's a fraud.

Making ridiculous false accusations only proves that you are anti-science. If you donâ€™t want people knowing it, donâ€™t go around shoving it the proof in their faces.

When you say, "the millions of years attached to the geological column are ridiculous ... No millions of years involved, a few thousand is the biblical time period" are you implying that the Earth's history doesn't go back billions of years, but rather only a few thousand?

Consider the sedimentary layers on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The way they are arranged doesn't make any sense from a diluvian perspective, but rather from the perspective of gradual accretion over a long period:

In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the sediment varies in thickness. The thinnest sediment is near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where new sea floor is currently being generated. That is to say, sediment thickness there is zero. The thickest sediment hugs the continental margins, which certainly have more than a few thousand years of accumulation. Try around 150 million year's worth! Funny, that the measured rate of sea floor spreading, when extrapolated backwards in time, gives the same age for the Atlantic sea floor as does radiometric dating. Funny, how the sediment gets thicker and thicker as one moves away from the sea floor spreading zone! That is, the farther we get from the Mid-Atlantic ridge the thicker the sediment tends to get; that thickness correlates with increased age of the sea floor as determined by radiometric dating as well as the known rate at which the Atlantic is widening. ...

What are the odds of such a triple "coincidence" occurring? It's easy to see why scientists "bet" on an old earth. And what about those magnetic stripes on the Atlantic sea floor? If that ocean floor is indeed spreading, then the thickness of those stripes and their distance from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge preserve a chronological record of magnetic field reversals. When those distances and widths are divided by the sea floor spreading rate, do we get a match with the magnetic reversal chronology based on the radiometric dating of continental rocks? Yes, we do!

It's not just biology you're up against. What about astronomy? If you can see the star V762 Cas in the constellation of Cassiopeia you're looking at light that left the star 16,000 years ago, long before the Bible says the stars were created (if you follow the Young Earth Creation Hypothesis). Not to mention the galaxies visible billions of light years away. What about physics and chemistry? Radioactive dating has the same implications for the YECH.

Well, again, I have a completely different interpretation of all that. I think the accumulated sediments don't need more than a few thousand years, actually the time since the Flood rather than the Creation, which is when I believe the continents split apart, at the Atlantic ridge in the case of the continents on either side of the Atlantic. And the current measured speed of separation is merely what the drift has slowed down to since that separation when it was much faster. And yes this means I have to reject radiometric dating.

Well, this is a work in progress and I don't expect to be able to answer all questions until later. I usually answer the astronomy question by saying that time is a completely different thing at that level. But again I'm happy to be sure of what I DO know for now.l The rest will fall into place later.

Speaking of astronomy, may I recommend the video "The Star of Betholemen" which I posted on the "Something Completely Different" thread...

You mean the sediments in the ocean? I didn't say they were accumulating at any particular rate at all. I said the continents started out splitting at a faster rate than they are separating now, having slowed down enormously over the last 4300 or so years. Seems likely that sediments have been falling off the continents at a pretty steady rate all that time. Might have started out faster because of the jolt of the separation. OR maybe not if the land was still wet from the Flood.